A novel contests Islamophobia by making the reader structurally unsure where the menace lies

Evidence

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a novel that discomfits the reader and forces him or her to think about what lies behind the totalizing categories “East” and “West,” “them” and “us,” and so on. … The novel plays out as a one-sided conversation between Changez and his suspicious American interlocutor at a restaurant table in Lahore. As the evening wears on, a sense of menace develops, although it is unclear when the novel ends in the deserted nighttime streets whether Changez is to be assassinated by his auditor, an overattentive waiter is lurking ready to ambush the American, or, indeed, the whole scenario has been the work of Changez’s imagination. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 444

Categorization

Category: Craft and Method

• XREF: This is a direct close reading of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, one of the two novels the reader wants to hinge scholarship and story on.

Related

• A novel contests Islamophobia effectively only by criticizing the West ontologically, not just behaviorally. (similarity 0.84)
• Novels can reproduce or contest Islamophobia irrespective of authorial intent through formal features (similarity 0.83)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist works as a double-authored text with competing narrators (similarity 0.83)
• Islamophobia-resisting fiction can work head-on or by unsettling readerly expectations (similarity 0.83)
• The novel contests Islamophobia primarily through form, not content. (similarity 0.83)
• Liberal novels on Islamophobia center non-Muslim protagonists for reader identification (similarity 0.83)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist operates through a double authorship spanning Hamid and Changez (similarity 0.82)
• Contesting novels deconstruct the frames, not just the content, of the Islamophobia debate (similarity 0.82)
• Formal and thematic features jointly determine a novel’s relation to Islamophobia (similarity 0.82)
• Novels contesting Islamophobia are enmeshed in the very market that trades on it (similarity 0.82)
• Fluid rather than militant identity makes a novel’s critique palatable to liberal Western readers (similarity 0.82)
• Novels that critique Islamophobia still get co-opted by the market they critique. (similarity 0.81)
• A well-intentioned novel can silently reproduce a society’s anti-Muslim fears (similarity 0.81)
• Literary criticism should read Muslim texts as intercultural negotiation, not alien-mind keys (similarity 0.80)
• Abstract anti-imperial critique stays palatable to Western readers where concrete grievance does not (similarity 0.80)